Books and Culture reviews two recent
books on reading
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/005/17.34.html
Ah, to have been a reader two centuries ago, in a golden age of English literature. Or so we think. But the thrust of William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is quite different. St. Clair has done prodigious research to drive home his thesis that in this “golden age,” books were largely inaccessible to ordinary people. Moreover, the real enemy of the common reader was the book trade. One bitter author from the early 19th century told the story of God endeavoring to find a London publisher for the Bible. The first one the Almighty approached “disliked the mangers and carpenters, wanted the characters to be made aristocratic, and asked for the story of King Herod and Salome to be expanded.” The next one offered to print it on a vanity publishing basis.
In the Romantic period, St. Clair explains, the English book trade was committed to positioning new literary texts on the costliest end of the spectrum, thus restricting sales to a tiny élite. A typical new book would have cost a maid six weeks’ income. This strategy reached its zenith with William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814). For the price of that book (48.5 shillings), a person could buy one hundred fat pigs. One man bought his own printing press and thereby set himself up in business for the same amount as this single volume of contemporary poetry!
Such an arrangement was no gift to authors, who, not surprisingly, generally wanted to reach a large audience. At such a price, Wordsworth’s book did not sell out its first edition for fifteen years, thereby holding back a cheaper version that might have reached the reading nation. Not a single copy of Wordsworth’s book was sold in his own home county of Cumberland. Even an aristocrat such as Lord Dudley felt he could not afford first editions. Publishers often destroyed copies that they could not sell at the list price rather than risk destabilizing the high-price atmosphere by discounting them. …
Read the full review:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/005/17.34.html
The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
Willliam St. Clair
Paperback: Cambridge UP, 2007
Buy now [ Doulos Christou Books $43 ] [ Amazon ]
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class.
Jonanthan Rose
Paperback: Yale UP, 2003
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
Scot McKnight reviews
Eugene Peterson’s new book Tell It Slant.
http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=4426
No one writes like Eugene Peterson and, because he has translated the Bible (The Message) in its entirety, there is probably no one who can plumb the depths of the spirituality of biblical language like Peterson. That he has chosen the parables and prayers of Jesus as the space for this topic in Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayers thrills me.
Question for the day: What has Peterson taught you? Which areas of life — other than political campaigning — need the most attention when it comes to language? What are of church life most needs attention when it comes to the words we choose to use?
My colleague, Mary Veeneman, was recently asked by Christianity Today to review Tell It Slant and the first thing that came to mind when I heard she was asked to review Peterson was a double-thought: good for you and too bad for you. I thought “good for you” because reading Peterson is always delightful, suggestive, and personally rewarding. I thought “too bad for you” because — as reviewers quickly learn — discovering his “thesis” is always difficult. Why? Peterson doesn’t present an argument but evokes a world. And how does a review argue with an evocation that is rich in imagery, metaphor, and insight?
…
Read the full review:
http://www.jesuscreed.org/?p=4426
Tell It Slant:
A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayers.
Eugene Peterson
Hardcover: Eerdmans, 2008
Buy now [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]
An Interview with Rob Walker, author of
BUYING IN: THE SECRET DIALOGUE BETWEEN
WHAT WE BUY AND WHO WE ARE
http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1117
…
SS: Regarding the book’s title, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, why do you characterize the relationship between seller and consumer as secret?
RW: People are always saying to me, “I’m not much of a consumer.” I think that’s indicative of this attitude a lot of us have in which we distance ourselves from branding and consumption. It’s this idea that it’s interesting to think about other people behaving in funny ways around that stuff, but it’s never you. People are comfortable talking about this when they read these behavioral economic books, that all these subtle things go on which affect our decision-making that we don’t consciously think about, but for some reason we don’t want to apply that thinking to day-to-day consumer behavior. And that’s why it’s a secret. That’s a big thing I hope people take away from the book — having a better sense of their own real-life thought-processes. Having this kind of “I’m above it all and immune to it” attitude is really counterproductive, and it’s exactly the place a marketer wants you to be. I’m not saying you need to make a spreadsheet every time you buy a box of cereal, but maybe thinking twice sometimes isn’t a bad idea.
…
Read the full interview:
http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1117
BUYING IN: THE SECRET DIALOGUE BETWEEN
WHAT WE BUY AND WHO WE ARE
Rob Walker.
Hardcover: Random House, 2008.
Buy now [ Doulos Christou Books $20 ] [ Amazon ]
I have long harbored an intuition that the desert fathers and mothers have provided humanity with some of the keenest insights into the depths of the human conidion. Kathleen Norris in her newest book Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks and a Writer’s Life, demonstrates a similar intuition, as she probes the little-known temptation acedia, which – although its usage has all but ceased in the English language – is alive and well in our consumer culture. What is acedia? Well, considering that Norris devotes a 40+ page appendix to laying out definitions and illustrations from historic and literary sources, one could say that acedia is hard to nail down. In brief, acedia comes from Greek roots that denote a lack of caring and could be described as a sapping of energy, motivation and focus that often leads to a restlessness culminating in “a hatred for the place, a hatred for [one’s] very life [and] a hatred for manual labor” (xv) – to use the words of the fourth century monk Evagrius. The desert monks found that acedia often set in during the heat of the mid-day hours, which also led some to refer to it as “the noon-day demon.”
Coming to Dan McKanan’s The Catholic Worker After Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation, I have in mind several relations I’ve had with Catholic Workers just over the past couple years, one of which being the agronomic university model in LaMotte, Iowa, New Hope Farm. In a recent email from the farm, the worker was excited by the immanence of Peter Maurin’s green revolution, and lamented that this book “missed this shift entirely,” so I was curious to see how that would develop over the course of the book. Entering into only the introduction of the text though, I am confronted by a certain reading of history, so foundational for the rest of the book, that it nearly overshadows the rest of the book for me; this is a construction of history so entangled with the politicized Western culture that it fails to see the most radical characteristics of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and the Catholic Workers. By aligning – and arguing fervently for – liberal politics with radical Christianity, McKanan reduces attributes that make the Catholic Worker so radical.
